Technical Field
Embodiments of this disclosure generally relate to an optical module manufacturing method, an optical module receptacle and an optical module.
Related Art
Alignment by active alignment may be performed when optically coupling an optical fiber to an optical/electrical converter mounted on a substrate. During active alignment, the optical fiber and the optical/electrical converter are relatively moved to have the two aligned such that, for example, the light coming into the optical fiber becomes most intense when the optical/electrical converter is in a light-emitting state. Such an active alignment process is time consuming resulting to have low productivity and be a costly method.
In contrast to active alignment, there is a method of performing passive alignment. For example, U.S. Patent Application No. 20100135618 (hereinafter, USPA-20100135618) discloses inserting the guide pins, of the optical connector ferrule (reference numeral 20 in USPA-20100135618) holding an end portion of an optical fiber, into the guide pin holes of the receptacle (reference numeral 80 in USPA-20100135618) on the substrate having mounted an optical/electrical converter allows for passive alignment between the optical connector ferrule and the receptacle which in turn allows for passive optical connection between the optical/electrical converter and the optical fiber.
Further, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2001-324631 (hereinafter, JP-A-2001-324631) discloses passive alignment with a configuration different from that in USPA-20100135618. JP-A-2001-324631 discloses forming a level difference for alignment to a substrate (reference number 1 in JP-A-2001-324631) equipped with an optical waveguide or an optical device and also forming a complementary level difference to an optical fiber connecting end component (reference number 2 in JP-A-2001-324631) used to match the two level differences to passively perform the alignment between the two.
In the structure disclosed in USPA-20100135618, the receptacle which aligns the optical connector ferrule needs to be mounted to the substrate, with a high degree of accuracy with respect to the optical/electrical converter mounted on the substrate. However, if an active alignment was to be performed when aligning the optical/electrical converter to the receptacle the process would be time consuming resulting to have low productivity and be expensive.
It is therefore an objective of the present invention to perform simple alignment of the receptacle and the optical/electrical converter on the substrate.